C. Cargill - Sea of Rust

“That sure sounds like an awful plan.”

“I love an awful plan.”

“So count of three, then?” he asked.

“Count of three,” I said.

I wasn’t sure exactly where he was, but by triangulating his voice, I had a pretty good idea. I imagined he was likely to pop out from behind his cover on the count of two. I didn’t plan on being around for that.

“One,” he said.

I ran.

“Two.”

There were stairs ahead that spiraled down straight to another set of doors. I bolted for those.

He never said three.

A shot rang out.

Hit me square in the back. I heard my backplate fly off, the sound of wires popping and sizzling.

Fuck.

The asshole had just shot my battery case. Killed my battery.

My system flickered on and off for a millisecond as I switched over to my backup. There was no telling how much damage I’d just taken, whether the battery was fried or my connection to it was merely severed. That I’d have to have looked at. But for now I was running on my reserve battery, which wasn’t meant for long-term use.

Of all the hits I could have taken, though, that was the one I could survive. Nothing vital, nothing that wasn’t off-the-rack at any decent sawbones. If I could get help in time, I could live through it. But it sure as hell put a real ticking clock on me.

I hit the stairs before he could fire off a second shot. Spinning on my heel, I both turned down toward the first floor and wheeled around to snap off a shot of my own without missing a step. The trigger clicked, the clip whined. And nothing happened.

Son of a bitch had been telling the truth.

And so had I. I had absolutely no more tricks up my sleeve. The only way I was making it out of here alive was if I could run fast enough and there wasn’t anyone waiting for me outside.

So I ran as hard as I could, shunting every bit of power to my legs, calculating every possible distance-shaving step ahead of me.

I hit the first floor and tore toward the doors, lobbing the plasma rifle over my shoulder, letting it clatter down the stairs behind me. That oughta buy me a few more seconds, I thought. Mercer’s footsteps slowed. By now he likely believed me about the traps; he wasn’t still kicking around the Sea because he was stupid. Better safe than sorry, even if it did mean losing his prey.

The last remaining wisps of daylight peeked in through the doors, the pink and purple shades of twilight swimming across the sky outside. It was still a hair too early. Usable darkness was still a good half hour away.

And then I saw it.

His buggy.

Battered, worn, its fiberglass frame chipped along the bottom edges from years of rugged use. It was painted a desert yellow, like me, and had scars from what looked like a pulse rifle.

Each buggy was different, cobbled together from dozens of different-model electric cars left behind after the war. Mercer’s was a light-framed jeep with a roll bar to rest a sniper rifle on, plated sides tall enough to keep the sniper safe while firing, and thick, wide, vulcanized tires to handle the terrain out here. It was no doubt keyed to Mercer and Mercer alone, so it wouldn’t start for me.

Not ordinarily.

I leapt across the side of the buggy, sliding perfectly into the driver’s seat. I popped the Wi-Fi open and held my right hand over the comms. From the base of my palm I ejected a six-inch USB stick, which I plugged into the open port. Then I scrambled the buggy’s electronics—slamming its system with access requests via Wi-Fi while giving it override commands via the hard port.

That’s the thing with cobbling together your own buggy—you’ve got to take whatever you can find. And most systems weren’t top-of-the-line when it came to security, instead running on mainstream driverless systems yanked out of any old car, modified only with a standard widely used manual drive code written twenty-five years back. And this was no exception. The code had eccentricities, and few bots knew enough about them to bother debugging them. If you fucked with the things enough internally, you could force a reset that would give manual control over to the driver, without the need for a password.

The system shut down, blinked, and began its hard reset.

Success.

Ten seconds. That’s what it would take to come back online.

I needed to last ten more seconds.

And that’s when I saw Mercer’s biggest mistake. Sitting there beside me. In the passenger seat. A roughhouser.

Roughhousers were as close to homemade weapons as you could get. Easily constructed with rudimentary tools and found materials, most everyone in the Sea had the specs for them, and even expertly crafted ones went for peanuts on the open market. They were single-shot canister guns that fired black-powder grenades filled with nails, ball bearings, and scrap. Not the most accurate weapons in the world, but they were great for shredding armor or taking off a few limbs without doing massive damage to a well-housed CPU.

In other words, they were great for hunting other bots, or gimping ones that might be after you.

I reached over with my free hand, grabbed the gun, and quickly pointed it out the side of the buggy at the mall doors just as Mercer came flying through them. He spun, immediately realizing he was in my sights.

But it was too late.

The gun THUNKED in my hand, hurling a shell straight for Mercer.

He spun, trying to dodge, but it caught him in the shoulder.

The shell burst like a firework, engulfing him in a brief sheet of flame, shrapnel shredding his shoulder, all but tearing his left arm out of its socket. He continued to spin, the blast throwing him to the ground.

He hit hard, rifle clattering from his hand, some twenty feet away. Rather than scrambling toward it to pick it up, he slithered quickly back across the piles of windblown glass, back through the doors, and into the thick shadows of the mall. He wasn’t going to risk me firing a second shot before trying to get off one of his own.

The buggy engine hummed to life. With the flick of a wrist I jerked the roughhouser forward, pulling the trigger, popping it open on its single hinge. Then I picked up a shell from a bandolier on the seat beside me, loaded it quickly into the breech, and pointed the roughhouser back at the doors.

“How you doing in there?” I called out.

“Better than you, I imagine. At least my batteries are still intact.”

“I could always fix that for you.”

“You can’t just steal my buggy, Britt. It ain’t right to leave me here like this.”

“You should have thought about what was right an hour or two back, Mercer. You can’t pull morality out of your ass once someone has you dead to rights.”

“You got me dead to nothin’. All you got is my buggy.”

“And all you’ve got is a long walk ahead of you. If you make it that far.”

“Don’t flatter yourself. You just winged me. I was thinking of getting a new arm, anyhow. How’s yours?”

“It’s great. It’s got a roughhouser in it.”

“Yeah,” he said. “I probably should have taken that with me. Say, how much juice you suppose you’ve got in that backup battery? From the looks of it, it’s the only thing you’ve got left.”

“It’ll get me to Greenville.” I was lying. I was already running low on juice, the first warning buzzing in the back of my head. I was going to have to be extremely conservative just to get to the nearest town.

“You weren’t headed to Greenville.”

“Well, I am now,” I lied. “That’s where you’ll find what’s left of your buggy.”

“Don’t leave me here like this,” said Mercer.

Mercer and I must have different definitions of winging . “Then step out of the dark. I’ll make it quick, I promise.”